The moving industry is far younger than its marketing. Of all licensed interstate household goods movers, 45.1% first registered with FMCSA within the last five years — and a quarter are two years old or younger. The median licensed mover is just 7 years old.
"Twenty years of experience" is the industry's favorite phrase. The registration data says the typical licensed mover is a recent arrival — federal authority is inexpensive, entry is easy, and churn is constant. New doesn't mean bad: every good company was new once. But it does mean the experience claims deserve a date check, and it explains something we've documented elsewhere: young, small carriers are precisely the ones federal oversight hasn't reached yet — 61.5% of one-and-two-truck movers have never had a roadside inspection.
A company's FMCSA registration date is public. Every carrier we list links to its federal record so you can see it yourself; a mover claiming decades of history with a two-year-old USDOT number has some explaining to do — sometimes legitimate (a new entity for an old family firm), sometimes not.
Method: ADD_DATE field (first appearance in the FMCSA census), same carrier filter as above, n with parseable dates ≈ 19,524. Retrieved 14 August 2026.